Learned D3 at Businessweek, started using Observable to do my job at Kensho, took time off to write notebooks about Mayans and Galton, moved to San Francisco to work for Observable. Now work for it remotely from the Berkshires where my wife runs Avaloch.
“If it’s pinned, it shows the code; if it’s hidden, it hide the output” may be the wrong naive expectation; I think naively you’d still understand that focusing opens the editor. So that column (Pinned? → No → Focused? → Yes) should be more green.
Showed this to Claire and her reference point is Excel, which reminded me of several things:
- It's conceivable to have an editor pinned to the window frame outside the scrolling document
- There's UI in Excel like "hide columns" which doesn't even have a tombstone, you have to go somewhere else to restore them, which isn't great
- Excel has sheet-wide keyboard shortcuts to toggle to showing input or showing output, which is kinda cool. Imagining transiently going into that state without forfeiting the specific pinning.
- Should have a standard term in the UI for "worker" and "editor" and a standard term for and orientation toward "show" and "hide" (rather than how "pinned" is oriented toward "show" and "hidden" is oriented toward "hide").